This is the feature I've been waiting for since I like to write games and port them to HTML5. I have an audio-only game that only worked in Chrome until today because I had the audacity to require left/right panning.

It's a chore to find how to re-enable core features that have been removed and disable terrible additions (like the recent giant green arrow animations every single time a file is downloaded)

Even then there are some that just don't have a way to re-enable. Like autocompleting URL bars that autocomplete entire URLs, and not just domains or partial URLs. Even more annoyingly, Firefox refuses to autocomplete ports - so if you visit http://localhost8080/ [localhost8080] Firefox oh-so-helpfully autocompletes just "http://localh

"Even then there are some that just don't have a way to re-enable. Like autocompleting URL bars that autocomplete entire URLs, and not just domains or partial URLs."

Or like the status bar. WTF was wrong with the status bar? If you didnt like it you could turn it off like all the other bars. They killed it all the way back @ firefox 4 (when the whole train seems to have gone off the tracks) and made it impossible for it to be fully reconstructed even through an extension. And, btw, that extension is now bein

Even then there are some that just don't have a way to re-enable. Like autocompleting URL bars that autocomplete entire URLs, and not just domains or partial URLs. Even more annoyingly, Firefox refuses to autocomplete ports - so if you visit http://localhost8080/ [localhost8080] Firefox oh-so-helpfully autocompletes just "http://localhost".

But I go to direct deep URLs on a lot of things.

FF plugin "Calomel SSL Validation" [calomel.org] has a checkbox on its Optimizations tab* to toggle the behavior you described. The prefs dialog must be accessed via the Tools menu; the toolbar button's sole functions are: 1) Changing color to indicate a weighted, aggregate measure of the security quality of an encrypted connection, and 2) when clicked, displaying score-points and the details from which they were derived (cert match,cyphers, key lengths, hash algo).

Do stop your whining already. If your time was that important you wouldn't update willy-nilly before you knew the issues, and you would probably have switched to a long-term release by now. Besides, it's not like the other browsers don't screw things up between releases, often in equally boneheaded ways.

Mmmm, now if only websites wouldn't use the "latest and greatest" whiz-bang features to eventually force upgrades..

A chore? How do YOU install new Firefox releases? All I do is go to Help->About Firefox->Check for Updates->Install.

It's not exactly spring cleaning.

su[root password]zypper update

Unfortunately, there is a delay between official release and openSUSE repository binary package, but it's relatively short. I think the "chore" part of it that he's referring to is that there's no longer any real reward: Firefox has become old and boring, and new updates (if anything) cause more trouble than anything in terms of fucking stupid design and GUI decisions, as well as extension hell (although the extension problem has been solved for while now it seems). Not to me

I mean... I get that mature software doesn't necessarily deliver awe-inspiring features all the time, but

But we're talking about Firefox. It's not mature by any stretch of imagination.

why is it news?

Hype. The whole purpose of ditching major.minor.build versioning was to get the hype of a major release for every single new build. Well, that and it makes it less convenient to maintain old branches in bugfix state, thus forcing everyone to buy into every new feature and feature removal unless they want to be

I don't understand why everyone complains about the Firefox release cycle when it is nearly identical to the Chrome/Chromium release cycle. And unlike with Chrome, if you want a stable version with just bugfixes, you can use ESR releases [wikipedia.org] which are supported for 54 weeks.

"I don't understand why everyone complains about the Firefox release cycle when it is nearly identical to the Chrome/Chromium release cycle."

We laughed at the Chrome brain damage and the fools that used it, secure in the knowledge at least our browser wasnt THAT stupid - and then it started doing the same thing. That's kind of it in a nutshell.

I do use ESR but I would be much happier with a fork going back to version 3 or earlier and maybe fixing some of the more annoying ancient bugs instead of trying to c

Yeah... 2.x IMO was the last truly great release, and after that it went downhill. For 3.x I was forced to start bookmarks, because of that god damn [anything-but] "awesome" bar, and I refused to use it until 3.6 (which added a few notable features that made it worth it). The problem is, 2.x is now obviously horrible out of date, lacks things like out-of-process plugins, leaks like a sieve, and is just unstable. Backport the rendering engine, security fixes, memory leak plugs, and maybe some of the better (

I had it crash randomly earlier (yes I reported to Mozilla) and I was doing some stuff with dynamically showing/hiding table rows with Javascript where the first row was full of th tags, bordered, 1px and the rest of the table cells had no border. When I showed the third row, and hid it again the whole table got vertical borders on table cells.

No other browser did this, and even inspecting the computed values showed no border set so a rendering bug I guess.

Nothing is wrong with the HTML5 audio tag.What I hate it the PERLesque - There's more than one way to do it. You know there will be 15 billion ugly, unreadable javascript hacks the the API interface where the HTML interface would have been just fine, as with all other areas of overlap between HTML and javascript.

The developers refuse to release a 64-bit browser, fix bugs, keep breaking 3rd party plugins between releases, like Citrix/Xen apps for example, or create a Metro option for the kiosk market. That would be news worthy instead of this rapid release schedule of major version releases.

64-bit is available in the nightly builds. It's not in the main tree because more people would have problems with it (most plugins, like flash, are 32-bit only)

It's why the default browser even on 64-bit OSes is 32-bit - plugin compatibility. Unless you're Google which ships Flash with every version of Chrome and can thus ship a 64-bit version with the 64-bit version.

Doing so in Firefox would just lead to a bunch of support tickets on why Flash refuses to wor

And on Linux 64 bit firefox is available by default, usually packaged by your distro.And it isn't the only plugin people care about. At least over here, the ones people care about seem to be Adobe PDF, Adobe Flash, Oracle Java.

Same here. I'm really tired of the almost-daily random crashes. And why is it that when I start after a crash or reboot, it tells me it can't restore my session, but then when I click the button it does so without fail?

And why is it that when I start after a crash or reboot, it tells me it can't restore my session, but then when I click the button it does so without fail?

Because it's not actually restoring your session - it's reaching across the void between dimensions, piercing the paper-thin veil that separates this from that, and stealing the session from another reality.

The reality Firefox has reached in may differ only in the angular momentum of a single sub-atomic particle. Ever notice that sometimes the session you

Obviously you are not a serious Javascript experimenter! Now that we've got canvas, WebGL, web workers, and audio, there's plenty of memory intensive stuff we can do inside the browser. The only limiting factors that distinguish web pages from real applications nowadays are your understanding of Javascript and how shitty of a browser you're willing to target.

More registers is about the only thing better for a browser. More than 4 gig of memory is a waste for a browser.

You can routinely go over 1GB if you're a heavy user or the pages themselves are heavy. Sometimes it's tab hoarding, I'm beginning to roll that back. But I can reach the 32bit 2GB limit without problem and with a 64bit linux, 3GB ram, 1.9GB swap, 64bit firefox I managed to fill everything up.The best reason to use a 32bit firefox on a 64bit system would be so it cannot possibly fill up all your memory and send you to swap hell.

Also, Chrome is a lot more memory hungry and can always fill up all RAM, because

However, at this point it is rather silly there is no windows 64bit version. They have had a linux and mac version for ages now. At this point is it really that big of a deal? Most of the 64 bit problems were worked out long ago...

Part of the Windows culture seems to be that most userspace apps are released as a 32bit version only.

Its had too many features removed and freezes for up to 20 seconds if you stop a page load, pages screw their formatting up, it has no solution for popup boxes that center themselves offscreen. gmail.com, mail.com both pretty unusable. (galaxy note 2). no undo close tab. most options removed.

Another Firefox releaseAnother security hole in Microsoft productsAnother Firefox releaseAnother security hole in Apple productsAnother Firefox releaseAnother security hole in Adobe productsAnother Firefox releaseAnother Firefox release to fix a security hole in the previous three releasesAnother Firefox release just to catch up to the Chrome version

Funny - I switched on my computer, intending to look up whether Firefox has the audio API implemented so that I can use it for my next project, and the first thing I saw was this update which added exactly that:P

The things I'm hoping to see soon from Firefox are CSS3 grids and support for multiple cookie jars.

I find browsing on the vendor built in browsers to be TERRIBLE. All the adds and crap flying around is twice as bad on a little tablet or phone because it is too easy to misclick. And browsing is already slower b/c of all the ads loading, it just ruins the experience for me.

Thank GOD for Firefox and the tweaks you can apply with 3rd party pieces. LOVE IT and I will NEVER change to something else.

Recommended. Firefox on Android still has many issues, but recent stable versions are much, much better than the first beta versions. There aren't that many add-ons available, but the ones that are available make the Android tablet browsing experience much more pleasant. The ones to look for: Adblock Plus, Self-Destructing Cookies, Ghostery and NO Google Analytics. Visit your favorite sites with the stock/vendor browsers, compare with Firefox+addons and decide for yourself.

Horses for courses. It depends on what sites you prefer to visit, I guess. I tend to regularly visit sites on my tablet that present information for reading (blogs, local newspaper, articles etc), not all-dancing, all-singing multimedia extravaganzas. But to be honest, I run across few pages these days that it has trouble with. Firefox is a little slow to load some pages, but that doesn't really bother me much. Earlier releases were somewhat buggy, but recent releases (in the last 6 months or so) are s

It feels weird to say it but Firefox is holding back the web. This is probably one of the most important changes to layout since designers/developers abandoned tables and moved to pure CSS based layouts.

Every stinking time I go to upgrade Firefox I have a laundry list of incompatible extensions and add-ons. So I get to wait a month or two and try again. Hey Mozilla, why not incorporate a little backward compatibility to allow the add-ons and extensions to work? That way we can accept a new update without losing functionality we had with the old version!

Just install the add-on compatibility reporter (it's an add-on itself)... that wlil allow you to use all the add-ons regardless of official compatibility. They pretty much all work even if they're "incompatible".

I've tried that in the past but my lament is the fact that ever since Mozilla went on the rapid version upgrade they keep changing things sufficiently to force the add on folks to do an about face nearly every time they push out a new release. Right now for example my AV add-ons for malware sites etc. don't work even with the compatibility reporter, so Firefox gets pushed to the side until that gets fixed and back to using Chrome or IE for now.

... instead of adding new features. FF22 (or 23?) brought with it WebRTC and a bunch of other crap that sent my installation's power usage skyrocketing. My laptop's battery life with Firefox running has dropped by about 30% (!!!!) - so much that I've stopped using GMail online and switched to Thunderbird so that I don't have to constantly have Firefox open.

Not anymore.The last 2 (well, now 3) versions of Firefox have been stellar. Look at the benchmark tests. These latest Firefox versions are smoking everyone else, including Chrome. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534-12.html

Your tone is flamebait, but your question is valid. Firefox has a project called MemShrink [mozilla.org] whose focus has been on reducing memory usage. In the time they've been going they have found and fixed leaks in Firefox; come up with better ways to find leaks in add-ons, which were the biggest culprit; changed how Firefox handles memory used by add-ons to eliminate virtually all such leaks; and optimized Firefox's memory management in a bunch of non-buggy cases.

So yes, if memory usage is what drove you away from Firefox you should take another look.

Web Audio seems to be about actually generating audio i.e. synth, mixing, filters, in javascript games or apps. That's different from providing dumb playback of sound files. OSS or ALSA would come after it in the chain, hopefully with the work they're doing the output sound server would end up being transparently selectable, i.e. choosing between ALSA, Pulseaudio, OSS, dummy, other..

BTW I tried to like OSS but have a few issues. No panel applet for xfce, mate, lxde etc., doesn't seem to work with my Xonar,